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@Mister_Baxter
That's more the issue with brakes, for me - to get a set-up where the braking force I can exert is a reasonable match for the grip the tyres have on the road - once you start to skid you lose most of your stopping power. So for a skinny-tyred road bike, I like something that doesn't grip too hard, but is nicely progressive in its action. I have to say that the brakes that have felt the best to me on skinny-tyred road bike are the Shimano twin-pivot 105 sidepulls.
On the other hand, with a big fat knobbly tyre, offroad, the harder the braking action the better, within reason - I remember the original XT V-brakes as being a revelation, compared to ordinary cantilevers. They were the ones with the parallelogram geometry and the special levers with the little plastic chips in to tweak the progressiveness of the braking action.
I would have though that disc brakes were inherently disadvantaged in one way, in that the leverage you can exert is much smaller because the disc is so much smaller in diameter than the wheel; on the other hand, it's up out of the mud and wetness a bit, and it's cheaper to replace a disc when you wear it out than a rim, so inherently advantaged in that way.